Lounge: Temporary Triage Ward

A pair of officers in teal uniforms struggled under the weight of the bloodied man they dragged into the main lounge, their faces tight with exhaustion and urgency. The once-inviting space had been hastily transformed into a makeshift triage ward. Tables and chairs were shoved against the walls, the floor now a chaotic sprawl of the wounded and dying. Dim emergency lighting cast flickering shadows, the air thick with the scent of burned flesh, sweat, and antiseptics.

The man they carried was mercifully unconscious, his body limp between them. His injuries were beyond horrific; more than half of his body was charred by plasma burns. What remained of his uniform had melted into his flesh, fusing synthetic fabric with ruined skin. His face was a mask of devastation, unrecognizable beneath the burns. The rank pips and combadge that might have named him were now gone, consumed by the flames. The only fragment of his identity left was the thin yellow department band around the cuff of his left sleeve: Operations or Engineering.

Nurse Bailey Taylor knelt beside him, her hands steady despite the pit forming in her stomach. She removed the hand scanner from the back of her tricorder and ran it over his mangled form. The prognosis was bleak. Her thumb hovered over the hypospray loaded with a high-dose narcotic meant to dull his pain—meant to give him peace before the inevitable.

She hesitated.

The rule of triage was clear: prioritize those with a chance. He had none. Every resource spent on him was one less for the others, who could be saved. And yet…

Biting her lip, she reached for the transporter tag on her belt and affixed it to his leg. A second later, the shimmering blue light of the site-to-site transport enveloped him, whisking him away to sickbay. Bailey exhaled sharply, rocking back on her heels. Had she just made a mistake? She knew the odds. She knew she had just diverted attention from patients with real chances of survival. But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t let this one die here on the cold, blood-slicked floor.

Around her, the wounded moaned. The ship shuddered under another impact. She clenched her jaw and pushed the guilt aside. There were others to tend to.

Sickbay

Things hadn’t been going as well as Lavender had hoped. More patients hadn’t made it than she had been expecting and she knew the Doctors and Nurses under her were starting to feel it. Her head was turned from the finishing steps of repairing a pictured lung by the sound of a materialising patient behind her. Re-initialising her tool, she finished the process and looked to the monitors, watching the patient’s o2 sat. All looked well with this one. Lavender had lost count long ago of how many she had treated under the bright task lights of sickbay. Names didn’t matter, rank didn’t matter, largely. A whole new system of importance held sway in her domain; severity was everything.

Satisfied with whoever it was who was now breathing again she turned properly to triage the new arrival and stopped. For the first time in what seemed like hours she didn’t move, Lavender just stared in bewilderment.

Her first emotion was anger. Lavender had been perfectly clear that those who were beyond saving should be given what pain relief and comfort they needed and not take up the resources of sickbay in lieu of those who would definitely make it, albeit with assistance. It was cold, to be sure. Cold as the iciest parts of Andoria, but it had to be done. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, or the one. But as Lavender considered the horribly stricken crewperson in front of her a different idea crept into her mind and took a seat, crossing its legs neatly and waiting to see what would happen next. The doctor span about, surveying all of the sickbay staff, gauging quickly what they were doing and how critical their patients were. Someone in the triage centre had sent this person over and they were sent for a reason. It might not be a good one, it might just have been through sheer sorrow, but it was done. Lavender had been thrown long-shot. Now she was going to run with the ball. The win would help morale. Taking initial scans with the medical tricorder quickly flipped open from the pocket of a rarely-worn lab coat, she leant in close to the patient’s ear.

“You’re in sickbay now,” she told him, tenderly. “You don’t need to worry anymore.”

Rising, Lavender shouted over the hubbub. “”People, this new patient is critical. It’s touch and go but I think I can save him. I know you’re all at one hundred percent. If you have anything you can give me, if you can delegate anything at all, do it and come lend a hand. Let’s see if we can win this one.”

Efe approached the patient. After over a year of intense combat, she didn’t need a tricorder to tell her that this was a critical case. It would have been touch and go under the best of circumstances, and this was far from ideal with the wounded moaning in pain and chaos of medical staff all around them shouting commands and requests for tools, plasma, and medications.

As if to underscore the precarious nature of the current state of affairs, the ship lurched to the right, and the Bajoran woman had to grip the edge of the biobed to prevent herself from being tossed to the deck. Glancing at Lavender for confirmation, her expression seemingly asking, “Are you sure, boss?”

The CMO had changed. The old Lavender wouldn’t have given a damn. Triage was triage, and this was the longest of long shots.  But that was good enough for Efe. She didn’t care what the reasons were. She would have Lavender’s back.  Pressing the embedded bed controls, servos whirred to life, and the scanning apparatus emerged from the sides of the bed, arching over the man.

She leaned over the man and peeled back a closed eyelid. The acrid scent of ash and cooked meat stung her nose, making her recoil slightly.

“The patient is unresponsive. Pupils are dilated and unreactive,” she reported, shifting her focus as the scanner as it clicked into place. Her fingers danced over the controls, and she rattled off the vitals:

“Heart rate: 146. BP: 70 over 40. Respiration: 31. O₂ sats: 84%. Core temp: 36. GCS: 4. Urine output: 0.5 mL per kilogram per hour.”

Lavender sized up the task.

“We better get that oh-two sat and B.P. up or all this will be pointless. I don’t want to put a mask on him because of the burns…”

Lavender erected a very low medical forcefield around the bio-bed. It didn’t stop people going through, but did allow for a potted environment around the patient when it came to things like oxygen levels in the air and temperature.

“Raising the air temperature two degrees and increasing the oxygen saturation. Let’s get a scan of those lungs and see if he can handle tri-ox.”

Efe nodded, jumping to action.  She pushed all feelings and thoughts to the back of her mind as she focused on the medicine. The chaos around her just became a dull hum, no more intrusive than the everyday shipboard sounds.

“Lungs are barely functioning,” she announced, reading from the display of the medical scanner. “Severe inhalation injuries, massive fluid buildup. We need to clear the airway and stabilize respiratory function before we even think about tri-ox.”

Lavender looked up from her panel, considering the next step. There were lots of technological ways of doing things but sometimes that just wasn’t on the cards.

“It’ll have to be an old-fashioned Intubate,” she told her colleague. “Grab the cart, Doctor Lorsa, please.”

Efe grabbed a ventilator and dragged it to her patient, the polymer wheels rattling along the sickbay’s floor.  With the tube in her hand, she paused for a heartbeat. She had never actually intubated anyone. Sure, she had done it… in a holodeck as a simulation. Biting her lower lip, she inserted the laryngoscope and fed the tube down the man’s airway. Without looking away from his vitals, she activated the ventilator, and the equipment hissed to life, pumping pure oxygen into his lungs.

Little by little, the vitals stabilized, and Efe let out a sigh of relief. Pressing the hypospray of the tri-ox compound into his neck, slowly but surely, he started to improve. He was far from out of the woods and would need extensive surgery and burn repair, but that could wait until the end of this crisis when they could devote more resources to his care. Besides, surgery while on a ship shaking like a bucking bronco was never a good idea.

Lavender nodded her approval.

“Nice work, Doctor.”

“No time for compliments, ma’am,” Efe said with a weak, tired smile.  “The crew needs us.”